


we were not tragedies

by defcontwo



Series: hold on to what we are, hold on to your heart [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Basically warnings for Jason's shitty childhood, Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, Community: queer_fest, Gen, Implied Child Abuse, Implied Underage, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-06-05
Packaged: 2017-12-14 02:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/831500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time they meet, she is Batgirl and he is thirteen years old and an incorrigible flirt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we were not tragedies

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Queer Fest prompt: DC Comics, Jason Todd, a young Jason Todd discusses his confusing feelings with Barbara. It sort of really spiraled out rapidly from there but c'est la vie. Heed the warnings.

In Gotham, there are stories that everyone knows. Urban legends and half truths whispered in playgrounds and in dark alleys - to children before they go to bed at night, so they know to be careful, to take care.

A door opening and the flash of a gun.

A pretty bird far from home and flecks of blood caked onto the rusted metal of a crowbar.

The trajectory of bright lives altered irrevocably, their lives reduced to a cautionary tale.

(We are more than cautionary tales).

+

The first time they meet, she is Batgirl and he is thirteen years old and an incorrigible flirt.

It makes her start to see someone other than Dick Grayson in that uniform but she knows better than to say as much. Jason's eagerness to please and put-upon bravado paint a pretty clear picture of a kid still insecure about his place in his new life.

Jason is a terrible flirt. Dick was too, to be fair, but they go about it in different ways. Dick was every bit as incorrigible but there was an optimism to his flirting, an unflinching self-belief that has always been equal parts charming and frustrating.

Jason flirts like he knows from the start that nothing will come of it, like he knows he's being a little bit ridiculous and he's alright with it. He has a smart mouth and a quick mind and he always has something to say about her orders, but still he follows them anyways.

She has been doubted so often in her life that she appreciates that more than he can possibly know.

By the time the mission is over, she finds she no longer looks over and is startled to see that curly hair and stubborn jaw beneath the Robin suit.

"You're not half bad, little bird," she says, hip-checking Jason slightly as they stand atop one of Gotham's oldest banks.

"Does that mean you'll go to the movies with me tomorrow?" Jason asks, turning to her with a cheeky grin.

Barbara rolls her eyes and hip-checks him again. "Time for you to fly home, little bird, I think it's past your bedtime."

Jason pulls out a grapple and line and steps up to the edge. "Hey, Batgirl?"

"What is it, Robin?"

"Thanks. I had a lot of fun tonight," Jason says. "You're way better to work with than Nightwing."

"Damn straight," Barbara says, laughing. "Good night, Robin."

"'Night, B-Girl."

+

The next mission Batgirl and Robin take together, they take down a pimp who was running an underground sex trafficking scheme.

For all intents and purposes, the operation goes well. The scumbag is arrested and thrown to the mercy of the GCPD. The young girls and boys that the man was holding hostage for his operation are at the hospital awaiting care and processing, so that they can be returned to their homes and their families.

It's the sort of case that Barbara usually feels good about solving.

But there was something angry and mean about Jason tonight - something in the way he moved, the way he fought. He was all business and sharp edges and each joke came out half-hearted and fell flat. It felt raw and personal and it stirred some unnameable worry in her gut.

She goes home and strips off her suit and puts her hacking skills to the test, tracking down Jason's juvenile record. Her fingers shake slightly on the keyboard and she almost walks away, gets a glass of water and then puts herself to sleep.

But she has to know.

The document gets pulled up on her screen. There's a lot of the usual suspects. Minor accounts of thefts, mostly car parts, and a few attempts to steal from convenience stores. All things that she would have already expected, given how Jason had been living before Bruce took him in.

Alongside them is the very thing she had hoped not to find: Jason had been dragged in a few years ago on juvenile prostitution charges.

She barely makes it to the toilet before throwing up her dinner. When she's done, when it's nothing more than dry heaving, she leans her forehead against the pale porcelain.

In Metropolis, in Star City, in any other city in the country, social services would have been called in immediately. But not in Gotham. Too many kids like Jason fall between the cracks in the system.

Not for the first time, Barbara finds that Gotham has thrown something at her that she wishes it hadn't.

She takes a deep breath and she hates this city a little more.

+

"Okay but I'm still failing to grasp how knowing the difference between sine and cosine is going to make me a better Robin."

"Pouting at me and the textbook aren't going to make either of us go away, Jason," Barbara says, favoring her student with a look that's going for strict and manages to land somewhere around fond.

It's been a little over a month since she began tutoring Jason in school. He's hopelessly behind for his age through no fault of his own, but he's bright and she hopes that between the two of them, he'll only finish school a few years late.

She hasn't said a word to him about what she knows and she won't, not unless he brings it up first.

"Not to disparage the humanities but I'm pretty sure mathematics will be more useful to you than English class, and you were all over that."

Jason rolls his eyes at her. "Literature is about _people_ , Babs. You gotta know people to do what we do."

 _He's got you there_ , she thinks wryly.

"Besides," he says, huffing out a breath that makes his curly bangs rise up. "Mary Shelley is _awesome_."

"Tell you what, Boy Wonder. We finish one more problem set and then you can tell me all about your recent adventures with the Titans."

"Yeah. Actually. Yeah, I've been wanting to talk to you about that." Jason ducks his head, suddenly serious.

Barbara frowns at him as he flips open his textbook and begins scrawling messily in the notebook alongside. He's glaring between the text and the blue-lined paper intently, barely even stopping to fidget the way he normally does when they go through math problem sets.

"You must really want to brag about your Teen Titans glory, huh," she says, testing the waters.

He grunts at her, a terrible habit that he's undoubtedly picked up from Bruce, and she frowns harder.

He finishes the problem set fifteen minutes later and shoves the notebook and textbook over to her without a word.

She corrects the problem set in silence, the scratch of her red pen along paper the only sound in the room.

“85%,” Barbara announces, setting her pen down. “Not too shabby. Now, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“What do you think of Roy Harper?” He asks baldly. It’s not at all the question that she expected, as she realizes that she has no idea where this conversation is going.

Barbara shrugs. “He’s a friend of Dick’s, I’ve only met him a few times, though he seems nice enough. Why, do you think he’s up to something?”

“I meant. I mean. What do you think of him compared to, I don’t know, Dick or something,” Jason says, ducking his head, a flush spreading along his neck.

Barbara narrows her eyes as she figures out what he’s trying to say. “Jason, are you asking me if I find Roy Harper attractive?”

Jason shrugs.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

Barbara runs a hand through her hair, trying to figure out the best way to proceed. She doesn’t feel old enough to go around dispelling advice but she gets the feeling that she might be the only person that Jason feels he can talk to about things like this.

“He’s good looking, sure, but then a lot of vigilantes are good looking, have you noticed that? We’re a statistically improbable bunch. But I’m not attracted to him, no,” she says and then waits a beat. “Are you?”

“Am I what?” Jason says, a touch defensively.

“Are you attracted to Roy Harper,” she asks, trying to pose the question as simply as if she were asking about the weather.

“Would it be okay if I was?” Jason asks, his voice small as he focuses on twirling a pencil around in his hands, avoiding her gaze completely.

Barbara feels her heart clench a little. “Of course it would be okay, Jason. Why do you think it wouldn’t be okay? Have you spoken to Bruce about this?”

Bruce is a good man but she’s always found him to be out of touch in a way that those born with a silver spoon in their mouth often are - he can be insensitive without meaning to be but if he’s been insensitive to Jason about _this_ , she might owe him a punch to the mouth.

Jason shakes his head.

“No, uh. I don’t want to talk to Bruce about this. I mean, we don’t really talk about much anyways. I’m afraid that he’ll just think that I’m - I don’t know, that I’m confused or something, that it’s because of -- “ Jason clams up mid-sentence.

“Because of?”

Jason doesn’t answer but the haunted look on his face answers her question for her.

“Jason, uh. I know. I know about that.”

“You do?”

“I read your file. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that without your permission.”

Jason draws his knees up to his chest on the chair, hiding most of his face behind one knee, and there will be scuffs left behind for Alfred to clean off later, but she can’t find it in herself to chide him.

“Kiddo? Do you want to keep talking about this or do you want me to leave?”

“No, uh. I want to keep talking about this.”

She waits patiently for several minutes until Jason starts talking again.

“But it’s not, you know. It’s not because of that. It’s not like - I certainly didn’t enjoy - I just know, all right? That it’s different. Liking Roy has nothing to do with that.”

“Is it just Roy or is it guys in general?”

Jason blows out a breath. “Guys in general. But also - also girls too. Is that normal?”

“It is for me.”

Jason’s head snaps up to look at her. “ _Really?_ ”

Barbara nods and well - this isn’t something that she’s told many people. She tried telling one of her closest friends at the library once and the headache that she’d received upon trying to explain bisexuality to someone who refused to believe it existed had scared her off ever wanting to do it again.

Even when every bone in her body tells her that she can trust Dick, that he will believe her and it will not be the nightmare she believes it to be, she still can’t bring herself to do it.

But with Jason sitting there looking scared and uncertain, the words flow out easily. “I’ve known for a while now. I’ve never had a girlfriend, though, so telling people hasn’t really been an issue.”

“Why not?”

“What?”

“Why haven’t you had a girlfriend?”

Barbara shrugs. “I guess I just haven’t met the right girl yet.”

“I bet when you do, she’ll be awesome.”

“Of course she will, little bird, I have excellent taste.”

Jason looks at her disbelievingly. “ _Grayson_.”

“Shush.”

Jason unfolds himself from the chair he had been perched on and moves around the table, as she opens her arms up for him to fall into. He buries his face in her neck and wraps his arms tightly around her.

“It’ll be okay, little bird,” she says, kissing the top of his head.

“Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” Jason mumbles into her neck, now wet with his tears. “Especially not the part where I started crying all over you. Bad for my reputation.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, kiddo.”

+

(Years later, there will come a day when Dinah crouches down next to Barbara in her wheelchair and tangles both hands in Barbara’s bright red hair and they will kiss, for the first time. It will be slow and deep and everything that Barbara never would have thought to hope for.

She will pull away and smile at the dazed but pleased look on Dinah’s face and in that moment, she will remember that conversation with Jason so long ago and she will think that he would have loved Dinah, and she will ache with how badly she wants to talk to him about this).

+

The first time they meet again, she is Oracle and he is nineteen years old, and at a crossroads in his life.

She has avoided reaching out to him since his return for reasons that she doesn’t fully understand, although perhaps she can admit to herself that mostly it’s fear that has stayed her hand. It’s the fear that Bruce and Dick are right about him, that he cannot be reached - that he has become a monster like James always was.

But with Bruce gone, Barbara knows that she can’t wait any longer. Divided or otherwise, she can’t imagine a world where Bruce Wayne didn’t mean the world to Jason Todd, no matter how much bitterness and spilt blood stood between them. Bruce’s death will alter Jason’s path in life irrevocably as surely as if the Gotham city streets were cracking and shifting beneath him.

She’d rather it not be for the worse.

She has her surveillance systems following Jason after his Tim Drake-aided break out from prison. He is predictable in his unpredictability - his methods for losing himself in the city, injured leg and all, are every bit as iron-clad and effective as Bruce taught him to be.

She times it just right so that the phone in the telephone booth rings as he’s walking by. She already knows that he’ll stop - a Bat never believes in coincidences. Her camera is too far away to see how his face reacts but his purposeful stride towards the telephone booth let her know she was right.

He slams the glass doors shut after him and picks up the receiver, and Barbara presses the button that puts him on speaker.

“Hello?” His voice is deeper and she doesn’t know why that surprises her, makes her breath catch a little, but it does. Intellectually, she understands that he is not the boy she used to know but knowing it and hearing it are two different beasts altogether.

“Hello, little bird.”

“Oracle,” he says, voice short and guarded. He’s suspicious of her but then again, she expected him to be.

“I want you to go to 17th and M. You know the old Clock Tower?”

“Yeah, ‘course.”

“You’ll find me there.”

“What, you’re not gonna give me any more than that?”

“You’re a smart boy, little bird, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

He laughs, short and harsh, into the receiver and the static comes out the other end, making her wince.

“What makes you so sure I’ll show?”

“Just a hunch.”

The next thing she hears is a click followed by the dial tone.

She is banking her hunch solely on the fact that there was once a young boy named Jason Todd who wore the Robin costume like a suit of armor that could protect him from all the nasty things that had ever hurt him - who had used that suit of armor to fight back against the darkness, against those who would drag the vulnerable down into the gutter.

She is counting on the fact that they were friends, once, that he had cared for her many years ago.

She is hoping that perhaps he cares for her still.

+

She waits thirty minutes and then an hour, and as another hour almost passes her by, Barbara starts to think that perhaps her hunch had been wrong.

That’s when she hears him.

He must have bypassed her security cameras, which throws her off for a second, but she hears the sound of heavy boots and the creak of a leather jacket in the dark coming up the stairwell.

“Jason?”

He steps into the main room of the Clock Tower but doesn’t approach her any further.

The first thing she thinks is that she can’t believe how big he’s gotten. He was always a little thing, the result of long term malnourishment, but whatever he’s been through in recent years, he sprouted up into a big guy. Dick had mentioned as much but seeing it in person is still a shock. It makes her feel as if he’s taking up half the room.

“You’re staring,” he says, and she can see from the way he hunches his shoulders in that she’s made him nervous.

“You’re a lot taller than you used to be,” she says.

He smirks and it is mostly put upon, a cover up for how anxious he is. Part of her thinks fondly, _typical Jason_.

“What, don’t tell me that _now_ you want to go out to the movies with me, Red.”

Barbara rolls her eyes. “Not in your life, little bird.”

“So, why am I here then?”

“I invited you here to discuss your plans for the future.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Don’t have any.”

Barbara arches an eyebrow. “You don’t have any _or_ you don’t have any that you feel you can share with me?”

“Whichever answer makes you feel better, Babs,” Jason says, that annoying put-upon smirk on his face again that she feels the sudden overwhelming need to punch until she finds something real underneath, something she can work with.

“Cut the crap, Jason,” she says, both hands clutching the armrests on her wheelchair so hard her knuckles turn white. “This is me you’re talking to here. More than anyone, I understand what you’ve been through.”

Jason stalks across the room until he’s leaning down into her face, both arms braced on either side of her. His shock of white hair close enough that it brushes against her forehead.

It’s a piebald streak, she thinks clinically, no doubt a result from the trauma left by the Joker. She counts backwards from ten and takes a deep breath. If he means to intimidate her, it’s not working.

“Do you? Do you understand, _Oracle_?” He spits out her chosen name like a curse. “I wasn’t aware that you’d had the pleasure of digging yourself out of your own grave. Do tell, maybe we can compare notes.”

“Don’t give me that bull, Jason. No, I don’t know what you went through. But I understand what it is to have to rebuild your entire life from the ground up. I know what it is to know that that _lunatic_ is to blame and I know what it is to feel so angry for so long that after a while, the anger is all you see.”

“Yeah? And how’d you get over that?” His tone is going for derisive but mostly, he sounds desperate.

She realizes that more than anything, Jason very much wants to know if she has an answer to that question.

“I didn’t,” she answers quietly.

Jason pulls back and collapses to the ground, sitting slumped against one of the wheels on her chair as if the wind got knocked out of him. He looks exhausted all of a sudden, exhausted and every bit as young as his nineteen years.

“I’m always going to be angry, Jason. But I reached a point where I knew that if I let it, that anger would swallow me whole and there’d be nothing left. And more than anything, I knew that that’s exactly what the Joker wanted. I’d rather not give the fucker the pleasure.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do, Babs,” he says, voice hoarse.

“I want you to work with me,” she says. “That’s why I invited you here today.”

“What, with your team?” Jason says. “How the hell would that work?”

Barbara laughs in spite of herself. “Nah, we’re girls only, little bird. But I’ve got an open case file five miles long. My girls can’t cover it all. I want you to work with me as your - “

“Handler?” Jason interrupts. “Gonna keep an eye on me so the big bad Red Hood doesn’t stray from the right path?”

“I was going for partner, Jason. I’m not going to order you around. I’m a voice in your ear telling you everything you need to know. The choices that you make out there in the field, those are yours and yours alone.”

“No guns, I’m guessing?”

She nods. “Look, I’m not gonna tell you to be nice, Jason. If you think legs need breaking, then they need breaking. But keep your head down, no guns and try not to leave a bodycount behind, not unless there’s no other option.”

“You’ll notice that I haven’t said yes yet.”

“But you’re going to.”

“Yeah, maybe, whatever,” he says, grinning hesitantly up at her, and for the first time, she sees in him the young boy that he used to be.

“It was never going to be easy, Jason,” she says. “But it gets better with time.”

He nods, absently. He doesn’t quite believe her but he wants to, that much she can tell.

It's a start.

“Hey, you know Black Canary and I were talking the other day,” Barbara begins coyly, in an attempt to lighten the mood. “She says Roy Harper is single again.”

Jason snorts and before she knows it, he’s laughing long and hard, the kind of laugh that makes his whole body shake, the kind of laugh that gets her laughing too. “Fuck, I am never telling you any of my secrets ever again, Gordon.”

“Don’t forget, I’m Oracle, Jason,” Barbara says, wiping tears from her eyes. “You don’t have to tell me for me to know.”

“That’s a little creepy, Babs. Now every time I have sex, I’m gonna wonder if you’re watching from your Clock Tower.”

“I’m sure Roy will appreciate your paranoia.”

Jason groans but it is mostly laughter filled, and Barbara lets a hand reach down to ruffle his dark, curly hair.

They’re gonna be fine.


End file.
